Overview

abstract

Progress from an idea into a high resolution microscopy application since the invention of Fresnel Incoherent Correlation Holography (FINCH) [1] will be chronicled. In its current state of development, picture perfect 3D images with resolution about two times better than the Rayleigh limit can be reconstructed from FINCH holograms acquired by fluorescence microscopy. A number of optical, electro-optical and computational advances by ours and other laboratories have made this possible. Those advances, including the introduction of liquid crystal optics [2] in place of spatial light modulators and other new approaches will be discussed. The simplicity of FINCH and the ability to use any fluorescent dye make FINCH an attractive method for 3D super-resolution microscopy. The following is a sampling of images demonstrating the high image quality, full field imaging characteristics and enhanced super-resolving performance now possible with FINCH fluorescence microscopy. In order to compare the resolution enhancement of FINCH imaging over widefield fluorescence, a microscope was designed that enabled the simultaneous imaging of the exact same field by FINCH and widefield microscopy as diagrammatically shown in Figure 1. Figure 1. Schematic of a FINCH holographic system using polarization sensitive transmission liquid crystal optics to create holograms according to reference 2.